Natural language processing – ETO Research Almanac

ETO Research Almanac

Between 2018 and 2023, researchers published roughly

170,000

English-language articles on natural language processing

The global natural language processing literature grew

99%

between 2018 and 2023

Articles on natural language processing made up

11%

of all articles on artificial intelligence

Authors from private companies contributed to

of natural language processing articles

What counts as "natural language processing" research?•How precise are these numbers?•What are the other caveats?

Explore relevant research in the Map of Science

Data last updated October 13, 2025

Vital signs

171,522
natural language processing articles were released between 2018 and 2023 (estd.)
99%
growth in research between 2018 and 2023
11%
of all artificial intelligence articles focused on natural language processing

Citation impact

26
citations for the average natural language processing article
20
citations for the average artificial intelligence article

Countries

18%
of natural language processing articles have American authors
18%
have Chinese authors
17%
have European authors

Country	Articles (2018-2023)	Growth (2018-2023)	Global share	Citations per article
United States	31,457	61%	18%	51.7
China	30,310	177%	18%	23.5
India	13,893	128%	8%	13.2

Top-cited articles

BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
2018: arXiv. 106,388 citations
Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
2020: arXiv. 45,880 citations
RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach
2019: arXiv. 26,964 citations
Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners
2019. 23,216 citations
Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer
2019: arXiv. 21,524 citations
GPT-4 Technical Report
2023: arXiv. 16,827 citations
Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks
2019: arXiv. 15,324 citations
LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models
2023: arXiv. 15,032 citations
Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback
2022: arXiv. 14,229 citations
Deep contextualized word representations
2018: arXiv. 13,516 citations

Research organizations

Top producers of natural language processing research (by article count)

#1 Chinese Academy of Sciences (China)
#2 Microsoft (United States)
#3 Carnegie Mellon University (United States)

Organization	Articles (2018-2023)	Citations per article	Country
Chinese Academy of Sciences	1,861	32.3	China
Microsoft	1,664	92.2	United States
Carnegie Mellon University	1,660	92.2	United States

Patents and industry

6%
of natural language processing articles are cited in patents
7%
of artificial intelligence articles are cited in patents
8%
of natural language processing articles had authors from private companies (vs 6% of artificial intelligence articles in general)

Top industry organizations by publication count

Company	Articles (2018-2023)	Citations per article	Country
Microsoft	1,664	92.2	United States
Google	1,198	261.7	United States
Amazon	1,013	44.9	United States

Research subject classifications are based on work supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation under Grant No. G-2023-22358. For details on our sourcing, methodology, and limitations, see the tool documentation.